Twitter is currently buzzing about the death of Dennis Ritchie, the visionary creator of UNIX and C, among other things. We hope it's just a false rumor. Story developing, we will be updating. Update: Unfortunately, it seems to be confirmed. Rob Pike, co-creator of the Plan 9 and Inferno OSes, who has worked with Ritchie in the past, and he's currently working for Google's GO language, posted this.

BeOS is quite indebted to Unix (and C++ to C), and Copland never even reached Alpha status. Of course, this kind of alternate history is a bit rubbish anyway, since Jobs might have based Next on some alternate-history descendent of the system that gained popularity in the absence of Unix. It's not like there wouldn't be something else out there.

My idea was to point out how much Apple's current success builds on the work of Ritchie, but I phrased it wrong.